The general area of wireless networks and mobile computing has seen an explosion in interest over the past few years. Two of the dominant architectural models for supporting wireless access to communication networks are cellular telephone networks and mobile-IP networks.
In cellular networks, the "problem" of mobility is handled by having all the routing decisions made at special purpose mobile telephone switching offices (MTSO). All traffic routed to a mobile will always pass through this MTSO, irrespective of the mobile's movement patterns. This approach makes inefficient use of network bandwidth and is unlikely to be useful for supporting more general applications.
Several techniques have also been proposed to allow mobility to be handled in IP networks. Initial proposals in the prior art supported mobility by having a "home" gateway forward packets to a mobile as it moved through the network. Recent proposals attempt to improve the efficiency of the routing process by disseminating the information about the mobile's location to network switches so that they can directly route packets it. However, the use of datagram routing in which different packets may take different paths through the network in combination with relatively slow route update intervals make this an unattractive option for audio and video traffic that require bounded delay.
Although, the cellular and mobile-IP networks have attempted to address the requirements of a large (but disjoint) class of users, the increasing desire for access to multimedia information on the part of these users will likely cause both network types to be supplanted by an emerging generation of cell-switching networks, such as ATM, which provide support for voice, video, data and image traffic. These networks are based on a virtual circuit (VC) oriented packet switching paradigm which makes it possible to associate and guarantee service quality requirements for a wide variety of multimedia applications. Accordingly, there is a need to address mobility management in the context of such a packet switching paradigm.